Book Promo
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH
FROM CHRISTOPHER DIGRAZIA: Ten Thousand Midnights: A Theda Bara Mystery
Hollywood, 1922. Paramount Pictures director William Desmond Taylor lies dead in his apartment, a bullet in his back. Baffled by multiple suspects and blind alleys, the LAPD turn to silent star Theda Bara for help. With her loyal friend, makeup artist Toby Swanson, she delves into the dark corners of Tinseltown to uncover Taylor’s killer. Fellow stars Mabel Normand and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle hold pieces of the puzzle, but Paramount chief Adolph Zukor is determined to hide the secret of Taylor’s murder at any cost. . .even if it means silencing Bara forever.
From the author of The Director’s Cut and The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of comes the third entry in the mystery series that Emmy-Award winning screenwriter Robert J. Avrech praised as making Theda Bara ‘a living, breathing woman.’
FROM ETHAN MOORE: Scorched Earth Volume I
In 2024, civilization was consumed in the Rebirthing fires. Ninety years later, Gerti Alvarez just wanted to survive the impossible task she had been assigned. Instead, she finds a scarred girl, a repair team trying to hold their town together, and a mayor hiding more than political ambition.
Scorched Earth: Volume 1 is a gripping apocalyptic adventure about loyalty, survival, and the cost of doing what’s right
FROM HYEOK LIM: The Posterity War
At 8:09 a.m., every serving politician dies. Governments survive, but the people authorized to act are gone—and Social Security actuary Claire Harlan discovers the catastrophe came from the future.
Claire falsified a federal model recertification to preserve her father’s secret treatment priority. After the attack, withdrawing that lie could stop the present’s retaliation—but it would expose what she did and freeze the funding keeping his private advantage alive. Her renewed concealment keeps the counterstrike review alive while a future coalition invokes 486,107,392 affected people—neither combatants nor a single constituency—as its warrant for war.
With fifty days before the temporal channel closes, Claire, acting president Jonah Ward, and future commander Iris Kade must create a peace neither era can counterfeit: a constitutional settlement, a chain of evidence no one controls alone, and physical disarmament on both sides. Confession will not be enough. Neither will victory.
The Posterity War is a standalone near-future political science-fiction thriller about power, custody, and what each generation owes the next.
FROM DALE COZORT: Devouring Wind (Exchange Book 2)
“They’re coming for us, from the sky and emptiness.” Ten months ago, technology guru Sharon Mack and her autistic and strangely prescient daughter Bethany were trapped in the wild alternate version of Earth called Bear Country. They took refuge at Fort Eegan, an outpost built by a peculiar cult with mysterious ties to the US government. Now a new Exchange brings terrifying new consequences.
The new Exchange blocks Fort Eegan’s water supply, threatening deprivation now and catastrophic floods in the future. It also pits Fort Eegan against beings with superior technology, inhuman ruthlessness and a weapon capable of devouring everything in its path, including Fort Eegan.
In spite of the danger from the new Exchange, the humans of Bear Country are nearing a war with one another. Ruthless escaped convicts hold hundreds of women hostage. With supplies dwindling, they eye Fort Eegan’s already limited resources. Inside and outside the fort, conflicts fester among the isolated humans, including a deadly love triangle. Fort Eegan’s only hope is to unite before it is blown away by the devouring winds.
FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: The Bard’s Kings: The Bard’s Song Book Two (Bard’s Song 2)
What price honor?
Tuathal mab Bria map Aiden gave much to break the curse he brought to the land. Echos of that curse send him across the sea, to the Western Isle from which came his father’s people, the Dunalaid. Only the High King can settle a question of inheritance, one that has already seen blood shed. Half of that conflict, Fyon the Black, demands land and lordship, blood price for his son, and perhaps even Tuathal’s life.
Tuathal travels as law seeker and speaker for his half-brother, Low King Fiachta. He seeks nothing but a decision in his king’s favor. Trouble lurks, what sort he does not know, but the sense he knows too well. The same darkness that led to the curse, and his naming as “Twice Given” waits inside the High King’s court at Tara.
A third king also has a claim to Tuathal, a shadowy majesty of the mounds and hollow hills. Only a master bard and law speaker, an allav, Tuathal struggles to do his duty.
When duty brings danger and the High King’s life hangs by a thread of song, what can a bard do, even a bard of three kings?
More than Tuathal believes possible.
FROM ANNA FERREIRA: The Root of All Evil
When murder comes to Stockton, it brings long-buried secrets in its wake…
Kate Bereton leads a busy but unexciting life as the clergyman’s only daughter in a small Dorsetshire village. She’s grateful for the break in routine heralded by the arrival of her stepmother’s latest guests, but when Kate discovers a dead body in the parsonage one morning, she finds herself in much more danger than she could have ever anticipated. Terrified and desperate, she turns to the local magistrate for help. Mr. Reddington is eager to aid his dear friend Miss Bereton, but can they discover the murderer before it’s too late, and the secrets of the past are forgotten forever?
With a dash of romance and a generous helping of mystery, The Root of All Evil is a charming whodunit that will delight fans of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie alike.
FROM PATRICK MCHARGUE: Starlight Revelation: Expansion, Book 1
What would you risk to publish a finding that no one wants to believe?
Jack Merrill is doing exactly what he’s supposed to — running sanctioned pipelines, processing telescope data, keeping his head down — when a side project neural net he’s been quietly testing flags something in the noise. Four faint smears of ancient light, carrying anomalous signatures that should not exist. He wasn’t looking for a paradigm shift. He found one anyway.
Starlight Revelation asks what the search for truth actually costs — not in the abstract, but in jobs, safety, relationships, and the slow pressure of institutions that benefit from comfortable certainties. Set in a near-future space observatory processing center thick with rivalries and beliefs, the novel follows a chain of people who refuse to let a finding die just because it’s inconvenient: a stubborn analyst, a fierce colleague, a principled administrator, and an outcast physicist who has been right about the wrong things for decades.
The universe holds its oldest secrets in the faintest light. Jack Merrill just found one.
FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Xochicuzmal Enigma: Book One of The Plata Worlds
When a mysterious spacecraft crashes far from the settled regions of the Plata Worlds, Captain Mateo Valdés expects to find an accident.
Instead, he finds a survivor wearing an unfamiliar golden protective suit, speaking an archaic form of a Plata language, and carrying technology centuries beyond anything known in the region.
Before he loses consciousness, the stranger says only one word:
Xochicuzmal.
An eccentric historian recognizes the name—and immediately becomes frightened.
What begins as an investigation into a mysterious visitor soon leads Mateo, the historian Dr. Tomás Arriaga, and their companions across ancient ruins, forgotten archives, and a buried structure that predates Plata civilization by thousands of years.
The old legends speak of a lost city called Xochicuzmal. But there is no city where the ancient maps say it should be.
There is something else.
A door.
And behind it lies a technology capable of connecting distant human worlds.
As Colonel Rafael Borda and his forces close in, Mateo discovers that the legendary Long Fires—the disasters that isolated the Plata Worlds generations ago—may not have been natural catastrophes at all.
They may have been the consequences of an ancient transportation network gone catastrophically wrong.
Now the network is waking up.
And someone, somewhere beyond the Plata Worlds, already knows it exists.
The Xochicuzmal Enigma is a classic science-fiction mystery of forgotten civilizations, ancient technology, political intrigue, and exploration, and the first novel in The Plata Worlds series.
FROM KAREN MYERS: Monsters, And More: A Science Fiction Short Story Bundle from There’s a Sword for That
A Science Fiction Story Bundle from the collection There’s a Sword for That
MONSTERS – Xenoarchaeologist Vartan has promised his young daughter Liza one of the many enigmatic lamedh objects that litter the site of a vanished alien civilization.
No one can figure out what they’re good for, but Liza finds a use for one.
ADAPTABILITY – The Webster Marble Deluxe Woodsman, Model 820-E, has been offline for quite some time. Quite some time indeed.
Good thing Webster has a manual to consult, and a great many special functions.
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Day the War Struck Home
Astronaut Peter Caudell comes home to find his daughter struggling with a school assignment. She’s to write an essay for Memorial Day, and her teacher suggested astronauts — but she wants to write about combat heroes, not REMF’s. So Peter suggests the NASA Massacre and relates his own part in those events.
It’s the summer of 1994, and the Energy Wars are raging in the Middle East. On the home front it’s the Summer of Fear, a season of continual terrorist attacks. All eyes are upon Kennedy Space Center, where a Space Shuttle is launching for a critical on-orbit repair of a spy satellite. When it goes up without a hitch, everyone breathes a sigh of relief.
However, the intelligence proves incomplete — the actual target is Johnson Space Center. Suddenly Peter is in the fight of his life, as the presence of multiple police agencies further complicates the fight to stop the terrorists from slaughtering the astronaut corps.
It’s a story of courage, patriotism and self-sacrifice that proves a much greater lesson than the teacher imagined.
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Originally published in Liberty Island Magazine as an Honorable Mention for the Memorial Day contest. This version includes a bonus essay on the genesis of the Energy Wars.
FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: All Precious Stones and Peoples (Timelines Universe Book 11)
Once, a million years ago, a water world populated with dolphin-like beings, the product of gene-alteration by their Progenitors on the Earth-like world one orbit closer to the sun, was flung into the cold and dark of interstellar space by the passage of a rogue star.
And four thousand years ago, its engineers were awakened from suspended animation to bring the world into a new orbit around a giant, blue-white star, where the waters of the World Ocean could thaw and life could continue to flourish.
This is the story of the A’ka’pa’i’ka’ti, and their Foretold Saintess, Speaker to the Dry Ones, born to communicate with the Progenitors when they finally arrived to reclaim the lost . . .
FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Other Rhodes (Rhodes Mysteries Book 1)
When Lilly Gilden discovers a cyborg in her airlock, she should turn him in for immediate destruction—harboring any cyborg means death, no exceptions. These abominations are born from violent, illegal brain extraction, forbidden across all human colonies. But this tortured soul believes he’s Nick Rhodes, a legendary detective from the 20th century, and his fractured mind may hold the key to finding her missing husband.
The penalty for harboring him is execution, but Lilly is desperate. Her husband vanished while investigating a case that leads straight into the galaxy’s most dangerous criminal networks. With time running out and nowhere else to turn, she makes a fateful choice: trust the half-mad detective trapped in synthetic flesh.
Joined by a mysterious journalist with secrets of his own, Lilly plunges into the shadow world of interstellar crime syndicates, corrupt officials, and deadly conspiracies. As the cyborg’s detective instincts clash with his deteriorating programming, Lilly must navigate a web of lies and violence where one wrong move could cost her everything.
In a universe where love is the ultimate liability, how far will she go to bring him home?
A pulse-pounding sci-fi thriller that blends classic detective with high-stakes space adventure—perfect for fans of cyberpunk mysteries, noir whodunits and interstellar romance.
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
If you have questions, feel free to to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: STRAIGHT.
